New Zealand Sees Country-wide Novopay Protests

Getting up at 5.50am and dragging myself and my 4 year old off to stand outside Hekia Parata’s electorate office is not my idea of fun. Surely a stay at home mum should at least have the luxury of a lie in until, say, 6.45?

But sometime you just have to do what you have to do, so today I inched myself out of bed, one eye closed, and shuffled into the shower.

Why?

People deserve to be paid correctly for the work they do

– school staff are not being paid, or they are underpaid, and in some cases overpaid. All of that is a nightmare for families trying to budget – it’s not just wages – wrong payment affect so much more. It sounds fabulous to be overpaid – but you are then left trying to repay the right amount and sort out all of the repercussions for tax, benefits, Kiwisaver and lord only knows what else, just like those who were underpaid or not paid. The whole thing is right royal mess.

Then there is the stress this is causing.

Staff that are wrongly paid spend hours on the phone to banks trying to juggle payments here and there, missing out on their early repayment bonuses for the electricity and so on, all adding to more stress and more mental energy taken out of the classroom.

Admin staff and school management are working ridiculous hours trying to get errors sorted. They have the stress of sorting out each and every mistake that Novopay has made, knowing that teachers, caretakers, teacher aids and the whole body of staff are relying on them to help sort it out. That’s one hell of a lot to have on your shoulders.

Shonky system and poor support services

Sorting out the errors is a farce, with hours waiting on the phone and endless paperwork. Did you know that Novopay is so badly build that schools staff cannot enter information online – it has to be done on paper, submitted and entered by Novopay staff… leading to even more errors and delays. Really, is this the same world where we can take a picture at a cafe and upload it to umpteen places within seconds? The same world where we can have online conferences, live, and can do our banking from our phone, tablet or computer? Seriously, what kind of outfit is Talent2 that its system doesn’t allow information to be input and uploaded by schools online? They deserve to go out of business for this shambles.

Joyce’s platitudes suck kumera

And while Steven Joyce trumpets that no teacher should be left unpaid, what he fails to point out is that processing the emergency payments, too, takes time and a lot of hard work for staff. And when those payments come out of a school’s operational budget then there are financial knock on effects there, too.

Schools need emergency payments to cover the hours staff are working to sort this out.